Poll Should it stay or should it go now

[Slyboogy]

I think one of the reasons why I don't consider Button's drive in Canada great, is because of the amount of DRS passes he made, it wasn't like Hakkinen in Austria, Alonso and Raikkonen Japan '05 coming through the field, or Raikkonen in Fuji '07, or Hamilton in Brazil '07.

 

[no-FIAt-please]

I think one of the reasons why I don't consider Button's drive in Canada great, is because of the amount of DRS passes he made, it wasn't like Hakkinen in Austria, Alonso and Raikkonen Japan '05 coming through the field, or Raikkonen in Fuji '07, or Hamilton in Brazil '07.

True to a certain extent. However that's like comparing certain drives from different eras, it simply cannot be done. I think you just have to see what is an average drive within a certain period of regulations and pick the stand-out performances and accept them for what they are.

 

[Galahad]

I suggest the fact that everyone thinks the regs need to be tweaked

Not everyone, surely?

 

[Slyboogy]

True to a certain extent. However that's like comparing certain drives from different eras, it simply cannot be done. I think you just have to see what is an average drive within a certain period of regulations and pick the stand-out performances and accept them for what they are.

Yep, but I am sure many others drove splendid races like Button this season e.g. Like Kobayashi and Schumacher in the same race, but being in slower cars they couldn't achieve anything at all.

 

[Mezzer]

Not everyone, surely?

I apologise, an overly general statement. How about, "most people have at least some issue with the way DRS is currently implemented in quali and/or the race"?

 

[Galahad]

 

[Incubus]

...and now for my brilliant ground-breaking daftest-ever genius innovative solution:

DRS to remain.
In reverse.
DRS to remain open throughout the lap, except in the case of a driver following another less than a asecond behind, at designated areas usually in the corner preceeding the longest straights. Driver behind enjoys more grip in the corner

That way the speed difference does not trake place in a straight but in the corner. Both drivers are on equal footing at the start of the straight but driver behind enjoys the momentum of having exited the previous corner faster. Speed difference along the straight is lesser than DRS in its current form, leaving driver in front more capable of defending. Plus overall grip levels throughout the lap is reduced, which is what the authorities are after.

Yes well, they did look down on Edison and Marconi too when they started having ideas, you know?....

 

[teabagyokel]

Yes well, they did look down on Edison and Marconi too when they started having ideas, you know?....

...or in Edison's case, nicking ideas and bankrupting Tesla

 

[siffert_fan]

I have said for a long time that the way to improve the racing is F1 is simple and will save money for the teams:

1. Ban the hideous high nose
2. Reduce the size of the front wings by 50%
3. Mandate steel brakes, perhaps even having the FIA supply them.

Cars are susceptible to "dirty air" because of the enormous size of the front wings, and the high noses required to mount such wings catch the turbulence and tend to rise while in the draft. Reducing the former and eliminating the latter would greatly reduce the problem and, as a bonus, the cars would be MUCH better-looking as well. Steel brakes, besides reducing cost, would lengthen braking areas and bring more skill and guts into passing.

 

[Pyrope]

...the high noses required to mount such wings catch the turbulence and tend to rise while in the draft.

Um, no. Sorry siffert_fan, I don't know where you get your information, but this is not the case. The high noses are nothing to do with mounting the wings. The noses are high to allow maximum airflow to the cars' underbody areas, hence maximising the performance of the diffuser and creating as much underbody downforce as possible. They also don't "catch the turbulence" or "rise while in the draft". Turbulent air is chaotic and so has no structure that could cause anything to rise or fall. This is why the wings the cars have work much less well in turbulent air. That's what causes the lack of downforce when trying to follow another car, not the nose.

 

[siffert_fan]

Turbulent air is not truly chaotic. It has upward and downward vortices, the positions of which remain fairly constant but the intensity of which changes with speed. If you can remember back a few years to when Mercedes' racers were doing "blowovers" at Le Mans, their analysis showed that the cause was following cars too closely, thereby catching the updrafts in the "turbulent" air of the wake, where the air is trying to fill the void left by the car's passing. Those updrafts, combined with the untimely hitting of a slight bump in the road created more lift than the car had downforce. The result--flight. Turbulent indicates non-laminar flow, not chaos.

When the high noses were first introduced by Tyrrell many years ago, the admitted purpose was to maximise front downforce by providing cleaner air for the wings to work in. That remains one of the primary purposes. Maximum downforce from the wings is needed to balance the downforce of the diffusers which also benefit from the cleaner airflow under the car which the high nose promotes

 

[Blog Zbod]

The overtaking in F1 had ebbed in recent seasons because:
1. The cars' speeds are too closely matched
2. Contact between cars is too perilous to tyres
3. Hermann Tilke is a pillock

The reason the car's speeds are too closely matched is the FIA have spent decades meddling with the TR on a fool's errand: attempting to eliminate the natural advantage of the better-funded teams by limiting the influence of invention and innovation. They have sought to "normalise" the outcome by progressively restricting what should have been the natural rise in the level of competition. They have made Formula 1, once the zenith of motor racing, technology-averse.

DRS is a symptom of the FIA's refusal to take ownership for the mess that is of their own creation. So is CURSE. So is the fast-dissolving tyre. So is the ban on in-race refuelling. So are the bans on the double-diffuser, the F-duct, the flexy front wing, the hinged tea tray, and the EBD with exhaust mapping overrun.

You cannot correct the problem of excessive regulation through more regulation.

At the moment F1 is trading on past glories. It no longer is the most technologically advanced form of motor racing on the planet. The business of F1 continues to thrive based largely on its social aspects and glamour of an F1 weekend but this cannot survive indefinitely unless there is a renaissance of the sport's competitive aspects. The race fans want to see races won as the result of epic duels, à la Hunt-Lauda or Senna-Prost, not because Sutil counted his remaining laps properly so it was he, not Kobayashi, who had use of DRS on the race's final lap.

 

[Pyrope]

The problem with that thesis, siffert_fan, is that the centre section of the wings is, by regulation, aero neutral. All of the wings' downforce is generated by the sections in front of the wheels. As you say, the turbulent air creates updrafts, but also downdrafts, sidedrafts, younameitdrafts and whatever. Implying that there is a constant upward pressure that would cause the nose to lift is wrong.

 

[siffert_fan]

Pyrope,

What effects the front downforce is the lack of laminar flow. Without laminar flow, the front wings cannot generate as much downforce as they do in clean air. This lack of front-end adhesion results in understeer.

Mandating lower noses would:

1) Reduce front end adhesion under all circumstances by reducing the size of the front wings.

2( This would require the teams to reduce rear adhesion to maintain balance.

3) The lowering of the nose would reduce the amount of air available to the rear diffusers which would partially achieve #2

As I said, the airflow is not "chaos"--it is lessened laminar flow. Although the regulations require the center section to be aero neutral, If the wing were sprouting from a lowered nose wide enough to contain a foot box for the driver, the de facto result is smaller airfoils and reduced downforce.

 

[Bill Boddy]

There seems to be some agreement that the source of the problem is the "dirty" air flow from the car in front. So it would seem logical to either reduce the dirty air or allow the car behind a reduction of it's drag on the straights. This is why DRS was brought in.

One way to reduce the dirty air would be to reduce the drag of the front car, achievable by using a full width rear wing to pivot the same way that the current DRS uses. The difference being that any driver would be allowed to use it at any time. If they didn't in order to keep the dirty air they would find that the car behind had a much greater DRS effect. Add to that unlimited KERS, removal of the rev limit and steel brakes and, hopefully, we would get some racing again.

 

[Mephistopheles]

Why not just design a car that works well in turbulent air? simples....

 

[Bill Boddy]

Why not just design a car that works well in turbulent air? simples....

Because it would not work in non-turbulent conditions. Since these occur for the majority of the time it would be self defeating.

 

[Pyrope]

Siffert_fan,

The central, aero-neutral section is already 50cm wide. Plenty wide enough for a driver's footbox, although this is a straw man argument as, again by regulation, the driver's feet have to be fully behind the front axle centreline. This would mean that, as now, they could taper the nosecone well before the wing needed to be attached. The size of the wings would remain unchanged. Take a look at the front wings on, say, the Williams FW14 or McLaren MP4/5, for example. Those aerofoils get a lot closer than 50cm in their midpoints, and the wings are narrower overall as, in period, keeping the active portion of the wing in the (relatively) laminar flow between wheel and bodywork was the preferred solution. These days, because of the mandatory neutral section, designers are forced to use the space available, even though it is less optimal.

I was never disagreeing with you about turbulent flow resulting in lessening of the downforce generated by the front wing, but you were talking about the nosecone lifting on the straight. What the car does on the straight has nothing to do with its cornering power, and the chances of there being enough sustained lifting flow over the nosecone to actually raise the nose of the car sufficiently to make the driver back off is zero. The Mercedes example only required a pulse of upward turbulent flow to coincide with a bump in the track, which then allowed the normal, flat-floor related blowover mechanisms to take over. The noses of the Mercedes cars are also much wider than the 20-30cm F1 nosecones, so the combination of these circumstances make the two very poor analogues.

As for it not being chaotic flow, I think you are mixing up "chaotic" with "random", two very different sets of circumstances. Random implies unpredictable and, essentially, isotropic. Chaotic implies unstable and sensitive to very small changes in the boundary conditions. Given infinite boundaries and highly stable flow dynamics, even a turbulent airflow can develop metastable structure. This isn't the case for a car, however, as they are much too close to the ground and change direction on a millisecond timescale. Hence, the airflow behind the car is very clearly chaotic, with fluctuations and pressure changes governed by the smallest of changes in ride height, exhaust flow, car attitude and so forth. This is why CFD still isn't able to properly model turbulent flow, as the system is so unstable. One millisecond your local flow is upward, the next downward, half a second later away from you, or whatever.

For a little more technical detail on how F1 teams are maximising the diffuser feed using the high-nose solution, take a look at this:

http://mccabism.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-red-bull-create-streamwise.html

 

[Andy Karter]

I've gone for a yes but hope that next year they refine its use so as not so contrived.